Most of us would step over, kick aside or scowl at a crumpled beer can in our path. Richard Van Os Keuls swoops in, scoops it up and carries it home like a prize.
Where others see litter, the architect sees glitter. And now, after eight years of collecting and personally flattening 15,000 or so cans of beer, soda and juices of all flavors, his modest '50s ranch house in Silver Spring is partially clad in crushed-can shingles that lend a colorful fish-scale effect. In the process, his home has become an idiosyncratic monument to recycling, and -- the pun is irresistible -- a gleaming example of pop art.
Architect Richard Van Os Keuls' Silver Spring home with its crushed-can shingles.
(Photos Mark Finkenstaedt For The Washington Post)
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"I think of it as a slightly carnival-like surface," says Van Os Keuls, 54. "It's not just the riot of color, but the way the sun hits it in different ways. On sunny days, it sparkles."
The project, a rear addition, was years in the making. "I tried to talk a few adventurous clients into trying it," he says. "When that didn't work, I did it for myself."
And how do the neighbors relate? Most seem to find the project intriguing, he says. Some have even donated empty cans to the cause. So far, there's only been one complaint. More on that later.
Some visitors glancing at the multicolored surface might not realize its throwaway origins. Artistic types might see a parallel between Van Os Keuls's siding and picassiette, a classic French mosaic technique incorporating broken ceramics. Some might recall such celebrated folk-art novelties as African American bottle trees in the Deep South or Houston's "Orange Show," a 3,000- square-foot edifice built by a retired mailman who filled it with ads and slogans proclaiming the virtues of the orange, as well as wagon wheels and tractor seats.
Eight years ago, Van Os Keuls was renovating the house he shares with his black Lab, Samantha, knocking down walls, ripping out ceilings -- doing every- thing he could to make the 900 square feet feel less cramped.
One day, he saw a truck run over a discarded can and had something of an epiphany: "What a great aluminum shingle that would make." He started hoarding empty cans with the idea of eventually doing something useful with them.
A gourmet cook, he had embarked on converting an old back porch into a roomier kitchen when it occurred to him that this presented the perfect opportunity to put his growing cache of cans to work. When the tar paper went up on the outside of the new kitchen, Van Os Keuls was ready.
He took the plunge about two years ago, pounding a single, carefully flattened Diet Coke can into place; he added another overlapping the first, then another. He began with the addition's long north wall, in a spot hidden from his closest backyard neighbor's view by a bamboo grove. He started at the bottom, meticulously working his way across and up, securing each can with a long aluminum nail.
The first section he tackled was "heavy on silver, red and white because most of my friends and I were drinking Diet Cokes," he says.
Van Os Keuls collects and personally flattens cans of beer, soda and juices of all flavors. (Photo by Mark Finkenstaedt for The Washington Post
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Farther up the wall, the colors begin to change. "Too much of any one thing gets boring. I eased into the idea that I should try to get beer, juice and soda cans from different countries," he says. "I looked for interesting graphics as well as a variety of colors."
Friends who traveled were encouraged to bring back unusual cans they might come across, and Van Os Keuls began buying drinks for the color of the can even when he didn't care for the contents. Like the two cases of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda, waiting in the unfinished addition. "I liked the chartreuse," he says.
Each can is emptied, washed (to avoid attracting ants), individually stomped (by the architect's heavy-soled construction boots), further mashed with a gravel tamper and, for that fish-scale look, neatly rounded with a sledge hammer. "I didn't want sharp corners, which might cut if someone leaned against the wall," says Van Os Keuls, now semi- retired from his residential architectural practice. Previously scrunched cans are unilaterally rejected, as are those "with cigarette, or worse, cigar butts on the bottom."
Now about two-thirds covered, the addition's long wall, the entrance, two planters and a wee bit of the east end are complete, gleaming with an international rainbow of drinks: red beers from the Netherlands, green beers from the Tyrol, yellows from China and a prized purple specimen from Budapest.
And that's not counting a host of root beers, cream sodas, ginger ales, sparkling waters, fruit punches, Yoo-hoos, Mountain Dews and two dozen orange cans of Moxie soda, a New England favorite, especially among Mainers.
"The Fantas rusted and had to be surgically removed," says Van Os Keuls, so now he tests each candidate with a refrigerator magnet to make sure it's 100 percent rustproof aluminum. A square foot of wall takes 32 to 40 cans. "Doing the math, I'll have run through about 22,000 by the time I'm done."
Though Montgomery County approved the material, it did take a slightly jaundiced view of his collecting methods. A year into the project with supplies running low, the architect started salvaging cans from public recycling bins in his neighborhood. "Someone took umbrage, took down my license and the next day two county officers with badges presented me with two citations and a $600 fine." One was for theft of city property; the other for transporting stolen property; mercifully, he says, it was reduced.
"I think they thought I was selling to recycling centers. I thought of it as turning trash into architecture," he says. "The irony is that in a neighborhood of 1,000 people, the raw material is readily available, but unless I ask them to save cans for me, collecting is illegal."
Van Os Keuls says if the process of can-flattening could be mechanized, the idea might have some application for low-cost housing. "It's probably too wacky for the middlebrows," he says. "Maybe it would appeal to the green crowd."
Inside, the kitchen addition is still a bit raw, piled with can-filled plastic bags. The renovated living room is also chockablock, but with books, carved oak French chests from the 15th century plus a grand piano. A restaurant-size stove eclipses the tiny existing kitchen where pots and pans hang from the rafters.
"He's a very bright man with an oddball sense of humor that makes for good company," says Washington architectural photographer Walter Smalling, a friend. "I've often thought that the whole house including the can siding is a physical manifestation of an informed mind that wanders to many subjects: antiques, art, music, medieval manuscripts, cooking, esoteric architecture. He reads about everything. He's sophisticated in a way that most of us are not."
Ray Rhinehart, another friend and frequent dinner guest, is senior director of special projects at the American Institute of Architects and an architectural scholar. "It's art in the most unexpected of places," he says.
"Quirky? Yes. But over time, I think what Dick Van Os Keuls has done will mature into one of those special things that make people say, 'You've got to come down the street and see this.' It gives the neighborhood a bit of soul."
